Hands On Nashville welcomes Starbucks fellows

Hands On Nashville is excited to welcome David Bradley and MaryBeth Konkowski to the team. David and MaryBeth are part of the Starbucks Foundation Service Fellows Program, a culmination of efforts from Points of Light and The Starbucks Foundation, created to help nonprofits build capacity while giving employees a chance to get more involved in their communities. Through the program, 100 Starbucks employees will serve for six months at agencies in 20 cities across the United States.  

David Bradley

Why Hands on Nashville? 

I started at Starbucks because it does a lot of secular good, just for the sake of being good. When I found out about the Starbucks Service Fellows program, and looked up Hands On Nashville, it seemed like Starbucks’ mission to do good lined up with HON’s mission.

How do you hope to grow throughout this term of service? 

I would like to increase my knowledge of the nonprofit world in general. I don’t have a nonprofit background; however, I have always been interested in social change and social theory. I’m currently working on a minor in sociology, but rather than just reading theories and understanding why things are wrong, I’d like to be a part of how to make things better.

What is one of your most memorable experiences as a volunteer?

I did a river cleanup with the Cumberland River Compact in Gallatin, Tennessee. We were able to go into the water beds and pull massive amounts of construction waste out of the river. A week later, CRC followed up with us, reporting exactly how much trash we pulled out. It was cool to see the extent of the impact we had on the health of the river.

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MaryBeth Konkowski

Why Hands on Nashville? 

I was really excited when I found out we would be working with Hands On Nashville! I moved here after graduating from college and found it difficult to make friends. HON was an organization that I used to get involved with the community, find volunteer opportunities, and meet some good friends.

How do you hope to grow throughout this term of service?

I was in the corporate world for a while, and it’s always been interesting to me how nonprofits get the funding to do the things they want to do, all while supporting other nonprofits. I’m interested in learning more about the behind-the-scenes of how a nonprofit operates.

What is one of your most memorable experiences as a volunteer?

My mom and dad instilled a heart of service in me at a young age. One of the earliest memories I have of volunteering was being toted along by my mother, who was volunteering at a senior care center near my hometown. I was too young to volunteer, but I remember sitting and listening to these older women talk and tell funny stories. Looking back, I have warm, fuzzy feelings and it makes me realize how spending time at this care center really warmed my heart.

 

Notes from the Farm: Summer Camp Feeds Hungry Young Minds

By Josh Corlew, Hands On Nashville Urban Agriculture Program Manager

Sunflowers last summer were beautiful – about to flower again!

For the past few weeks, the Urban Farm has been thriving with activity. The mild spring weather and mix of sun and rain has made the fields so happy — the garlic is ready to harvest, the tomatoes and peppers are beginning to set fruit, and the sunflowers should be opening their heads in just a few weeks. With our second full growing (and teaching!) season underway, we can’t believe how much has been accomplished in the last year thanks to the community’s support!

Along with all of the anticipation around growth and renewal on the Farm comes the excitement of our second year of Hands On Nashville’s summer youth development program called Crop City. This farm-to-table, curriculum-based camp engages 400 young people in fun learning activities around healthy eating, nutrition, and connecting them to where food comes from — the ground! Most of the participating children are from neighborhoods with limited access to fresh produce. Through Crop City, the youth get a chance to learn from one another, play a role in growing the vegetables at the Farm, and learn about making healthy food choices. During the final week of the program, chefs from local Nashville restaurants will visit the youth on the Farm and show them how to prepare simple recipes using the healthy produce they’ve helped to grow. (Special thanks to Chef Tony Galzin of Flyte World Dining and Wine, and Caroline Galzin of Rumours Wine Bar, for their support in this effort!)

Crop City campers this week playing an ice breaker game – Giants, Wizards, and Dragons!

We were inspired by the results of last summer’s program at the Urban Farm: participants were able to recognize more vegetables than they had at the start of the program, and more than 75% said they were trying to make healthier food choices as a result of their experience. We are working toward even bigger and better outcomes in 2013, and can’t wait to share them with you!

Hands On Nashville Urban Farm Apprentices during their training last week doing a team-building exercise.

 

One of the coolest aspects of Crop City is that the curriculum is lead by the Hands On Nashville Urban Farm Apprentices. Selected through a competitive application and interview process, these amazing teenagers are leading all of the Crop City activities under our guidance. We’ll be introducing the 15 Apprentices via this blog soon, so stay tuned! (They are one incredibly talented group of high school students.)

Last summer, Chef Tony Galzin (Flyte World Dining & Wine) demonstrated how to make a tasty, healthy salad using the veggies the campers helped grow. We are excited to have Chef Galzin back again this year for the cooking workshop in July!

The community continues to be very supportive of our efforts at the Farm. We have enjoyed working with several corporate volunteer groups over the past few weeks on infrastructure improvement projects at the Farm. Special thanks to Starbucks, Ford, Cummins, and Deloitte for their hard work and support.

If you’re looking to get involved with the Urban Farm, there are two ways to support our efforts:

1) Volunteer! During the summer, our public volunteer opportunities are a little more limited, since we have so many young helping hands. But we do have weekly early-morning composting projects, and we’d love to have you join us (a perfect way to make an impact but beat the heat!).
> Click here to sign up. 

2) Support our Urban Agriculture Program with a monetary gift.
> You can make a donation here. 
Be sure to type “Urban Agriculture Program” in the “description” field.

Planting sweet potatoes. These turn into vines with purple flowers (and the sweet potatoes are so fun to dig up once they’re ready!)

If you have questions about the Urban Farm, please email me at josh@hon.org. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more Farm updates throughout the growing season!

 

 

 

 

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Josh demonstrates how to plant spinach at the Urban Farm this spring.

Josh Corlew is Hands On Nashville’s Urban Agriculture Program Manager. He oversees the organization’s efforts to engage volunteers in service opportunities that empower them to gain gardening skills, learn about healthy eating choices, and help address our city’s food access issues. An AmeriCorps alumnus, Josh also has a secret past life as a Trekkie (he’s a big fan of the TV series Star Trek, for the uninitiated among us), and he has been known to participate in death-defying canoe trips.

A New Urban Garden for Nashville

By Josh Corlew, Hands On Nashville Urban Agriculture Program Manager –

[This Saturday, Hands On Nashville will officially launch its new Urban Farm as part of Global Youth Service Day Presented by Starbucks. Join us and volunteer. Read more about the Urban Farm here.]

The first time I saw the property along Mill Creek in Southeast Nashville, I felt a rush of anticipation. It seemed to be almost bursting with raw, untapped potential. Soon my head was swimming with possibilities: gardens with perfect sets of companion plants; fruit and nut trees surrounded by veggies; beautiful flowers providing a place for good bugs to live; rain gardens to keep the ground from flooding; composting systems; a worm farm; a little cove filled with mushrooms; walking paths and gathering areas for neighbors, volunteers, and young people.

Hands On Nashville volunteers working hard to create the first of two 70' x 70' row gardens that will grow tasty things like tomatoes, squash, and salad greens. All produce will be given to local nonprofits that serve low-income communities.

And then I started to feel a little overwhelmed by how much work needed to happen to get the HON Urban Farm off the ground. But soon I remembered the past year, working with volunteers to put in a new urban garden in partnership with Trevecca University. There were a lot of good lessons learned: double digging is hard work but worth the effort; cover the garden paths because the weeds creep in fastest from there; basil and tomatoes love growing close to each other. But the most important lesson that the garden taught me was that plants are designed to grow and survive.

This lesson is a huge relief. It makes my job so much easier to know that all plants that I want to grow are trying just as hard to stay alive as I am trying to keep them alive. In fact, they’re probably trying even harder, and they certainly have more experience at it than I do. My job is simply to provide an environment that gives each plant what it needs to thrive. While this can be a big job, it’s comforting to know that the plants I put into the ground are designed to live and produce food.

A happy, tired group of volunteers after a recent hard day of work at the Urban Farm.

It’s much like what we’ve been doing at HON for over 20 years now. Instead of working ourselves into a frenzy about meeting all the needs in our community, we know volunteers are out there every day doing that work; many of them not even through Hands On Nashville. It’s like the way that flowers, fruits, and vegetables don’t require a formal garden to grow. Wild flowers, onions, and asparagus can be readily found all over an empty field. Apples, figs, cherries, and mullberries are all over the streets and parks of Nashville. But like the gardener creating a healthy space for plants to grow, HON simply tries to make volunteering as accessible as possible by using the organization’s infrastructure and network to capitalize on existing community resources.

 

So when I look at HON’s new Urban Farm that is just budding, it’s re-energizing for me. I’m challenged to be the best steward possible of the ground, working with volunteers to create a place that can produce as much healthy food as possible in a sustainable way. At the same time, I’m relieved that I’m not working at this alone and am reminded that I’m a part of a network that includes tens of thousands of volunteers working to make Nashville a better place to live, work, and play. With that kind of momentum, I know we’re going to succeed at whatever we set our minds to. [Interested in volunteering at the Urban Farm this summer? Check out upcoming opportunities.]

Josh Corlew is Hands On Nashville’s Urban Agriculture Program Manager. He oversees the organization’s efforts to engage volunteers in service opportunities that empower them to gain gardening skills, learn about healthy eating choices, and help address our city’s food access issues. In 2011, Josh developed and implemented an urban garden program at PERK Urban Farm, in partnership with Trevecca University, that engaged 1,000+ volunteers and produced 700+ pounds of food on a 2.5-acre plot of land. An AmeriCorps alumnus, Josh also has a secret past life as a Trekkie (he’s a big fan of the TV series Star Trek, for the uninitiated among us), and he has been known to participate in death-defying canoe trips.